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Under the skin of Gitana X

The latest Rothschild yacht is the first 60ft trimaran to have come from Gilles Ollier & co in almost 15 years.

Gitana X
The Gitana series of boats has been associated with the Rothschild family since 1870, the most famous perhaps being
Gitana VI, the 65ft S&S maxi that was a regular participant in offshore races during the 1970s. The latest
Gitana X represents something of a departure from this tradition...
What is significant about
Gitana X is not only that it is a 60ft trimaran, but it is the first to come from the hand of Gilles Ollier and his team and to be built at Ollier's Chantier Multiplast since Jean Maurel's lack lustre
Elf Aquitaine in the late 1980s. Ollier and Multiplast have in recent years been synonymous with the giant catamaran of The Race, such as
Club Med, and also as builders of the yachts for the French America's Cup team.
In fact although Ollier and his chief designers Yann Penfornis and Franck Martin and Jack Michal handled the bulk of the design, also heavily involved in this process was American C-Class specialist
Duncan McLane and Sebastien Schmidt, one of the designer's of Ernesto Bertarelli's lake racer catamaran
Alinghi, recent winner of the Bol d'Or.
Coming into a circuit where three designers dominate, Ollier and his team were bound to be subject to some scrutiny in terms of which ideas they had borrowed from other boats. But Yann Penfornis told
madfor
sailing that they started from scratch, went back to first principles and looked at many different solutions before coming up with the final design.
"When we designed this hull we didn't try to copy the other ones, even if it is the first 60ft trimaran we have designed since
Elf, we didn't want to pretend to do a van Peteghem boat designed by Ollier. So it is the Gitana design team. Duncan McLane, specialist for the Little America's Cup. He

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